hi there,

it’s been a while.

i have finally upgraded my linux desktop to arch linux, and wanted to sync my latest Garmin Forerunner data with my linux. it’s quite simple if you follow these next steps.

first you’ll need a bunch a packages installed.

    sudo pacman -S python2
    sudo pacman -S python2-pip
    sudo pip2 install --pre pyusb
    sudo pip2 install pyserial
    sudo pip2 install lxml

Afterwards you’ll only need to do:

    sudo pip2 install distribute
    sudo pip2 install python_ant_downloader

Now if you plug in your Garmin ANT+ USB stick and run “lsusb” you should see something like that:

    Bus 003 Device 006: ID 0fcf:1008 Dynastream Innovations, Inc. ANTUSB2 Stick

We need this information to create a udev rule, in order to mount non-standard usb sticks automatically. Those devices follow permission rules that are present in /etc/udev/rules.d/.

The following command creates such a udev rule for our ANT+ usb stick.

    sudo bash -c "echo 'SUBSYSTEMS==\"usb\", ATTRS{idVendor}==\"0fcf\", ATTRS{idProduct}==\"1008\", MODE=\"666\"' > /etc/udev/rules.d/99-garmin.rules"

After this, you’re good to go. You have your USB stick connected to the laptop/pc and then can run the following command

    ant-downloader

On the inital run it can take a while till it actually grabs your data, because it generates a config called ~/.antd/antd.cfg In this directory you’ll also find a sub-directory called 0xDEVICENR/tcx/ where all your workouts are stored in raw and tcx format.

As a final step I usually upload my workouts (tcx) to a website called Runningahead.com but you might as well upload it to your garmin account directly.

Hope you like it as much as I do. ;)